[Nutritional screening in heart failure patients: 5 methods review].

Introduction: Malnutrition increases mortality and hospital stay. Increasingly Sanitary institutions follow nutritional screening in order to detect early malnutrition or the risk of developing. There is not universally accepted method for nutritional assessment or screening.

Objective: Determine a fast and reliable method that doesn't require prior training, for the screening and nutritional assessment of heart failure's patients.

Method: Observational study. The nutritional status have been evaluated by Subjective global assessment (SGA), Mini nutritional assesment (MNA) in his short form (MNA-SF) and in his evaluation form (MNA-LF), the nutritional Risk Screnning (NRS 2002), the controlling nutritional status or method Ulibarri's method(- CONUT), the Cardona's method and the Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool (MUST) the nutritional status of 242 patients joined in a high complexity hospital with decompensation of chronic heart failure. There were analyzed the sensibility, specificity, the predictive values, the reasons of verisimilitude, the odds ratio diagnoses and the kappa correlation index, of the different methods compared with the subjective global valuation, which was considered like gold standard.

Results: The mean age was 75±9. The 50,8%(n=123) were men. The kappa index was MNA -LF : 0,637; MNASF: 0,556; NRS =0,483; MUST =0,197; Cardona =0,188; CONUT =0,076.75. Discusion: Mini Nutritional assessment (MNA) was the method that best value offered, both in its screening stage of assessment in relation with Subjetive global assesment.